Mike Wolfe won the North Face Endurance challenge on Saturday, which was pretty much the only major victory for a US runner at a top-level ultra all year (depending on how you define such things). Running 50 miles with 10K of elevation gain in 6:19 is nuts. What's even more impressive to me, however, is that he accomplished this while working as an Assistant US Attorney somewhere up in Montana. For those of you unfamiliar with legal world, that's a very hard job to get, and it's super demanding once you get it. I can only imagine that Mr. Wolfe's alarm clock is set for a very early hour every morning. Most of his top-level competitors were students and folks who work part time or in a semi-running related field. To beat the world's best competition while maintaining that kind of a job shows otherworldly discipline and dedication.
Huge props to him.
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Totally unrelated. I have been on the sidelines the last two weeks. I went for a run a couple of weeks ago and felt great. I was running sub-7 minute miles with my HR below 150, something I hadn't done since my college days. I had visions of 2:4X marathons dancing in my head, and then, out of nowhere, I felt a sharp pain in the back of my leg. I limped the rest of the way home.
Turns out I have a sprained Lateral Collateral Ligament, or LCL.
WTF?
That's not even really a running injury, near as I can tell.
Anyway, I took about 5 days off. I can walk on it just fine, so I've been visiting the Wash Park rec center most days, turning the treadmill up to the max incline, and walking up it for an hour. Kind of a D-league, urban version of Mr. Krupicka. It isn't that fun, but it's keeping me sort of sane as I wait to heal. I'm guessing it's probably going to be another couple of weeks before I can run again, but since this isn't really a typical running injury, there's not a lot of guidance for how long the recovery's going to take.
Bummer.
